What College Early Decision Results Teach Us About Waiting

December 24, 2025

There is stillness in a house on the December evening when Early Decision results arrive. Not silence, exactly, because the world continues, the coffee brews, younger siblings move through their routines, but there is a kind of suspended animation, as though everyone is holding their breath. The student, usually, checks their phone or laptop alone, in their room, the door closed. The parents wait downstairs, or pretend to be occupied with something else, trying to give space while also trying to read the sound of the footsteps, the quality of the silence, whether it will break with joy, or with something harder to name.

By now, some of you know. The Early Decision has come…acceptance, deferral, rejection…and the holiday season, which was supposed to be about family and rest and celebration, has become complicated by this verdict. For some families, there is relief, even jubilation. For others, there is disappointment that sits heavily at the dinner table, that shadows the lighting of candles, that makes cheerful relatives' innocent questions about college plans feel like small cruelties.

We are in that strange temporal space between semesters, between one year and the next, and these Early Decisions arrive precisely when we are most conscious of time's passage, most aware of beginnings and endings. The timing feels almost orchestrated to force contemplation: What does this outcome mean? What does it say about the last three years, about all that work, about who this young person is or might become?

Kafka wrote that "the meaning of life is that it stops." A dark observation, perhaps, but there is something clarifying in it, that boundaries, that endings, that moments of resolution teach us what actually mattered in the time that preceded them. Early Decision results are not, of course, endings. But they feel like them. They feel like verdicts on years of effort, on identity itself.

And this is precisely where we go wrong.

I have sat with families in the days after acceptances, and I have sat with families in the days after rejections. What strikes me, always, is how quickly we assign meaning to outcomes that are, in truth, far more arbitrary than we allow ourselves to believe. The student who was accepted begins to construct a narrative in which this was a natural culmination of their efforts. The student who was rejected begins to question everything, their intelligence, their worth, the value of all those hours spent studying and preparing and hoping.

Both narratives are false. Or rather, both are too simple to capture what actually happened.

The college admissions process, especially at the most selective institutions, is not a meritocracy in any straightforward sense. It is a complex system involving institutional priorities…geographic diversity, legacy preferences, athletic recruitment, departmental needs…that have nothing to do with any individual applicant's merit. A student can be genuinely extraordinary and still be rejected because the university needed an oboist for their choir this year, or because they admitted too many students from that region last year, or because the application reader happened to have read forty applications before this one, and needed something different to maintain attention.

This is not comforting, I know. It feels, perhaps, like I'm suggesting the process is random, that effort doesn't matter, that excellence is irrelevant. But this is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the outcome of a single application to a single institution is not a meaningful measure of a person's worth or potential. It is just data about institutional needs meeting individual qualifications at a single particular moment in time. Nothing more.

Montaigne observed that "we are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." The student who was rejected knows, intellectually, that admissions decisions are complex and imperfect. But they cannot quite shrug away the quiet voice that refuses to go away, saying this outcome is about them, about their inadequacy, about their future being smaller than they imagined.

And the student who was accepted knows, intellectually, that this is the beginning of years of hard work, not the culmination of it. Yet they cannot quite suppress the joyful voice that keeps saying they have arrived, that they have proven something definitive, that the difficult part is now over.

Both voices are misleading. Both prevent us from asking better questions.

As we sit with our teenagers during these holiday weeks, whether we are celebrating an acceptance or processing something more difficult, I wonder if it might be worth asking not about outcomes but about the journey that led to here. Not "Are you happy with where you got in?" but "What did you learn about yourself in the last three years? What became clearer about what you care about? When did you feel most alive intellectually?"

These questions have nothing to do with any particular institution's decision. But they have everything to do with whether the time was well spent, whether our child developed not just credentials but capacity also, and not just about achievements but self-knowledge as well.

The deferral, which feels like the cruelest outcome…neither acceptance nor rejection, just more waiting…is perhaps the most honest reflection of what this process actually is. You have not been found wanting. But you have not been fully validated either. You are simply asked to continue, to remain in the uncertainty a while longer, to discover whether this particular institution will ultimately be part of your path.

And perhaps this is the deeper lesson the whole process offers, though it is a lesson we resist: the lesson that we do not control outcomes as much as we imagine, that we can do excellent work and still not receive the result we hoped for, that worthiness and reward are not as tightly coupled as we have been taught to believe.

This is not nihilism. It is simply reality. And within that reality, there is freedom. Freedom to do meaningful work for its own sake, to pursue excellence not because it guarantees a particular outcome but because the pursuit itself is worthwhile, to understand that our child's value is not determined by which institutions accept them.

The holidays always ask us to pause, to step back from striving, to remember what matters beyond achievement. When Early Decisions arrive, that pause coincides with decisions that feel like they determine everything.

But they do not determine everything. They only determine which institution your child will attend, if they choose to attend that one. They do not determine their capacity for growth, their potential for contribution, their ability to lead meaningful lives.

So perhaps, this holiday season, as we sit together, whether celebrating or consoling or simply being, we might allow space for a question larger than "where did you get in?" We might ask: "What do you want to learn next? What are you curious about now? What matters to you, independent of where you study it?"

These questions will serve our teenagers far longer than any early decision result.

I'm curious: for those of you whose children received results this month, what conversations are you having? What are you learning about resilience, about identity, about what this process has meant to your family?

Wishing you peace and perspective during these complicated, tender weeks.